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actors of The Roaring Girl offer up Moll’s body to multiple, eroticised future meetings with varying audience opinion. This figuring of the commercial viability of The Roaring Girl is dependent on the idea that female imperfection is beyond repair, the site of the permanent fracture of sexual difference that horrifies Leontes in the early stages of The Winter’s Tale. In
(II.i.186–7). It may be that in early performances spectators accepted that Oberon was invisible to the lovers in spite of the character looking precisely as he did at the moment before he became unseen. Notably, Oberon’s verbally constructed invisibility is still material, in that the audience imagine the fairy king to be unseen while still watching the body and gestures of the actor who plays this
and sexual difference. 30 The relevance of cultural meanings of motherhood for The Winter’s Tale has already been recognised in a number of studies focusing on Hermione’s maternal body. 31 Significantly, these readings of the play are at times invested in the unknowable, deferred ‘wholeness’ invoked by Hermione’s statue. For example, acknowledging the ‘decidedly patriarchal’ nature
making of Euphues to the production of an incomplete image: For he that vieweth Euphues will say that he is drawn but to the waist, that he peepeth as it were behind some screen, that his feet are yet in the water; which maketh me present your Lordship with the mangled body of Hector as it appeared to Andromache
ideas fornication → body apparently stuck in Shakespeare’s mind: in 1.3 Toby urges Andrew to ‘Accost [Maria] ... front her, boord her’ (54–5); when she rebuffs him, the pair fall to talking about the quality of their bodies: hair, legs, throats, and dancing skills (92–100, 110–37). Paul protests the Corinthians’ bouts of raillery and drunkenness much
organ made by John Haan and dated to 1611–12, at Hatfield House ( figure 1 ). 5 In this swirling composition depicting intertwined bodies of animals, mythical beasts and semi-human figures, Buckett, the son of a German refugee, ‘adapted a plate from Newes Gradesca Büchlein , a suit of grotesques designed by the engraver Lucas Kilian (1579–1637) and published in Augsburg in
to carry some altering character with it , either in the temper of the body, mind, or both’ (177, my emphasis). So it well might take seven years for the soul to be thoroughly quit of the body. The principal source of Elizabethans’ superstitions about the dominion of seven was the Old Testament, which – excepting the racy bits of the Song of Solomon
Carey and James Gournie In addition to time-shifting the on-stage action, Shakespeare sketched into King John an episode linking the Bastard with Henry Carey. He contrives for his Bastard to free the captured Queen Eleanor in 3.2, a feat performed by John in The Troublesome Reign ; this is a nod at Carey’s body-guarding Queen Elizabeth during the
and more realistic. He notes that Simon Forman, who claimed to have ‘supped with her [Lanier] and stayed all night’ describes her as a harlot who “useth sodomy ”. [W]hile he felt all the parts of her body “willingly” and often kissed her, she would not “halek” [have sex] with him (a halek is a little fish used for making pickle; to be in a pickle is to be in a hole).’ O
attached to emblematic verses’. 27 The emblematic model of pictorial representation as a passive, semantically limited body awaiting enlivening contact with inherently meaningful verbal signification extensively informs critical appropriations of the ‘speaking picture’ motif in discussions of early modern drama. In these critical readings, theatre goes beyond the verbal reach of the emblem